Fire perimeter, burn severity (dNBR), spatial fire regime and land use data for the North American Cordillera of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, 1985-2022

The data release contains spatial data sets in raster and vector formats that are used to quantify, analyze and visualize recent fire regimes for the Mogollon Rim-Colorado Plateau (also called the Mogollon Highlands), the Sky Islands, or Madrean Archipelago and the Northern Sierra Madre Occidental regions of the United States and Mexico. The data were generated as part of the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center-funded project titled "Assessing Vulnerability of Vegetation and Wildlife Communities to Post-Fire Transformations to Guide Management of Southwestern Pine Forests and Woodlands." Specifically, the data release is comprised of 3 different compressed (zip) files containing the following data: Dataset 1 Fire Perimeters - A fire perimeter (burned area) dataset ranging in years from 1985-2022 that was created by merging fire information from existing wildfire databases available in the United States, and custom Landsat burned area mapping products generated for areas in Mexico. The zip file contains separate polygon files for each ecoregion. Dataset 2 Burn Severity – Fire severity rasters calculated as the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) from Landsat data for each fire perimeter. This dataset contains dNBR images of all individual fires in a zipped folder. Dataset 3 Fire Regimes and Land Use Variables – Fire regime metrics were generated from the above data sets including: 1) number of times burned raster @ 100m, 2) Fire deficit/surplus layers based on the expected number of fires for each vegetation class, 3) maximum fire severity, mean fire severity and fire order-weighted burn severity all @ 30 m, 4) fire order-weighted seasonality (ignition date) surface high resolution, 5) Anthropogenic Biomes (Anthromes) describing biotic community type and population density within a 1km focal window and 6) roadless volume rasters at 100 m resolution.